Martians and Metadata -- a Halloween themed repost

 [From Wednesday, October 30, 2013]

Just in case you don't know the story:

The War of the Worlds is an episode of the American radio drama anthology series The Mercury Theatre on the Air. It was performed as a Halloween episode of the series on October 30, 1938, and aired over the Columbia Broadcasting System radio network. Directed and narrated by actor and future filmmaker Orson Welles, the episode was an adaptation of H. G. Wells's novel The War of the Worlds (1898).

[Written primarily by Howard Koch who went on to do some other interesting work, but nobody talks about the writer.* ]

The first two thirds of the 60-minute broadcast were presented as a series of simulated news bulletins, which suggested to many listeners that an actual alien invasion by Martians was currently in progress. Compounding the issue was the fact that the Mercury Theatre on the Air was a sustaining show (it ran without commercial breaks), adding to the program's realism. Although there were sensationalist accounts in the press about a supposed panic in response to the broadcast, the precise extent of listener response has been debated.

In the days following the adaptation, however, there was widespread outrage and panic by certain listeners, who had believed the events described in the program were real. The program's news-bulletin format was described as cruelly deceptive by some newspapers and public figures, leading to an outcry against the perpetrators of the broadcast. Despite these complaints--or perhaps in part because of them--the episode secured Welles' fame as a dramatist.

Of course, no one who heard the whole broadcast panicked. The first line listeners heard clearly spelled out what was about to come: "The Columbia Broadcasting System and its affiliated stations present Orson Welles and the Mercury Theatre on the Air in The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells."

But most of the people who were listening when the show ended hadn't heard the beginning of the show. They had been listening to one of the highest rated acts on radio, a ventriloquist named Edgar Bergen (you might want to take a minute to reflect on the concept of a radio ventriloquist before continuing). About fifteen minutes into the hour, the show cut to a musical interlude and people started channel surfing.

Though we don't normally think of it in those terms, the title of a program is data, as is the author. We feed it into the algorithm we use to interpret what we see, or in this case, hear. People who didn't hear the words  "The War of the Worlds by H. G. Wells" tried to impute the genre based on the information they heard when they first tuned in to what seemed to be a reporter covering a disaster.

Check out the first few minutes and think about what you'd conclude.



PBS has a special commemorating the anniversary, but I'm staying loyal to the original medium and recommending this radio documentary produced for KPCC.


* Welles' relationship with Koch in some ways foreshadowed the controversy over Citizen Kane. Here's Pauline Kael's summary.

The Mercury group wasn’t surprised at Welles’s taking a script credit; they’d had experience with this foible of his. Very early in his life as a prodigy, Welles seems to have fallen into the trap that has caught so many lesser men—believing his own publicity, believing that he really was the whole creative works, producer-director-writer-actor. Because he could do all these things, he imagined that he did do them. (A Profile of him that appeared in The New Yorker two years before Citizen Kane was made said that “outside the theatre … Welles is exactly twenty-three years old.”) In the days before the Mercury Theatre’s weekly radio shows got a sponsor, it was considered a good publicity technique to build up public identification with Welles’s name, so he was credited with just about everything, and was named on the air as the writer of the Mercury shows. Probably no one but Welles believed it. He had written some of the shows when the program first started, and had also worked on some with Houseman, but soon he had become much too busy even to collaborate; for a while Houseman wrote them, and then they were farmed out. By the time of the War of the Worlds broadcast, on Halloween, 1938, Welles wasn’t doing any of the writing. He was so busy with his various other activities that he didn’t always direct the rehearsals himself, either—William Alland or Richard Wilson or one of the other Mercury assistants did it. Welles might not come in until the last day, but somehow, all agree, he would pull the show together “with a magic touch.” Yet when the Martian broadcast became accidentally famous, Welles seemed to forget that Howard Koch had written it. (In all the furor over the broadcast, with front-page stories everywhere, the name of the author of the radio play wasn’t mentioned.) Koch had been writing the shows for some time. He lasted for six months, writing about twenty-five shows altogether—working six and a half days a week, and frantically, on each one, he says, with no more than half a day off to see his family. The weekly broadcasts were a “studio presentation” until after the War of the Worlds (Campbell’s Soup picked them up then), and Koch, a young writer, who was to make his name with the film The Letter in 1940 and win an Academy Award for his share in the script of the 1942 Casablanca, was writing them for $75 apiece. Koch’s understanding of the agreement was that Welles would get the writing credit on the air for publicity purposes but that Koch would have any later benefit, and the copyright was in Koch’s name. (He says that it was, however, Welles’s idea that he do the Martian show in the form of radio bulletins.) Some years later, when C.B.S. did a program about the broadcast and the panic it had caused, the network re-created parts of the original broadcast and paid Koch $300 for the use of his material. Welles sued C.B.S. for $375,000, claiming that he was the author and that the material had been used without his permission. He lost, of course, but he may still think he wrote it. (He frequently indicates as much in interviews and on television.)

 

Introducing the Shafer Algorithm for Covering Journalists' Ethical Lapses

[Written 9/30/24]

Just as the Nuzzi story started to deflate, Ben Smith managed to pump it back up

I had hoped to avoid writing about last week’s big media scandal. We were scooped, to Max’s eternal regret, by Oliver Darcy’s excellent new newsletter, Status, after we ignored a Wednesday evening email from one “Anderson Jones.” Jones, an anonymous sender with an Iowa IP address who has since gone dark, had a “news tip”: New York magazine’s Olivia Nuzzi had disclosed to Vox she’d had a romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. ...

As best I can reconstruct the events, of the publications we know of New York magazine apparently had this story first but decided not to make a public statement. Semaphor was tipped off but decided not to pursue the story. Eventually Status eventually decided to run it but only with numerous caveats about how reluctant they supposedly were. The second case is particularly interesting. Vince Smith who founded the site was previously notable for publishing the unedited Steele Dossier, despite pretty much everyone knowing that it was filled with unverified and in some cases probably false charges. Smith's decision turned out to be a tremendous boon for Donald Trump and his supporters, allowing them to bundle all of his grossly inappropriate and very real connections with cooking into one big "Russia hoax." Smith seems to have rethought his "We have always erred on the side of publishing." credo since then (or perhaps he's just a huge hypocrite).

Reporters have all sorts of compromising relationships with sources. The most compromising of all, and the most common, is a reporter’s fealty to someone who gives them information. That’s the real coin of this realm. Sex barely rates.

You won’t hear many American journalists reckon with this. (Some British journalists, naturally, have been texting us to ask what the fuss is about. If you’re not sleeping with someone in a position of power, how are you even a journalist?) The advice writer Heather Havrilesky texted me Saturday that “the world would be much more exciting with more Nuzzis around, but alas the world is inhabited by anonymously emailing moralists instead!”

 This is an absolutely stunning position for a journalist to take, arguing that the world would be more somehow better off without sources anonymously coming forward with information about wrongdoing. This is got to be the only time I have seen someone in the news industry responding to a story being broken by a by attacking the tipster.

This is the soul of the Shafer algorithm. You make up an entirely new set of rules for friends and colleagues and still somehow manage to take a morally superior tone.

Many of Nuzzi’s critics were furious at her over a July 4 story about members of Joe Biden’s inner circle who felt he was too old to run for president. How, these critics ask now, could she have done that story fairly if she had an emotional attachment to a fringe candidate?

And this is where two values of journalism part ways. The obvious defense of that story is that it was true, something few Democrats now contest (though the few that do continue to loudly fill up our email inboxes and Twitter mentions).

 Some distortions here and at least a couple of major lies of omission. Smith misrepresents the reaction to the Biden story. It is true that there is now a strong consensus, even among Democrats, that Biden stepping down due to his age was the right choice, though that didn't really firm up until after the successful handoff to Harris avoiding the nightmare scenario of 1968 and her surprisingly successful campaign (even her supporters didn't expect her to do this well). The balance and fairness of Nuzzi's piece is a topic that is not addressed (I haven't read it so I have no opinion). It is also worth noting that Smith's suggestion that being noteworthy and true are sufficient reasons for publishing something raises serious questions about his decision to kill a story about a peer (maybe he switched back to his original credo mid-essay).

We could go back and forth from the Biden piece. It's much more difficult to justify Smith's decision to skip over all of Nuzzi's other more flagrant conflicts of interest with respect to Kennedy. We only have her very questionable word that the affair began after the profile was published. If it started during the writing of the article, we have the brightest of red flags. Even if we trust her timeline, there are still at least two occasions when she made extremely probed in the remarks in the editorial pages of the New York Times (still waiting for the paper of record to apologize for that, by the way). Still later came the puff piece "humanizing" Trump written while RFK Jr. was angling for a place in a Trump administration. This isn't a complete list – – we haven't even gotten into social media – – but it is certainly enough to make a damning case.

Fortunately, there are press critics who are having none of it.

KABAS: This has brought out a lot of different opinions from people. At first there was a general consensus that it was not a good look, that she did the wrong thing. But then other people started circling the wagons to protect her. Then Ben Smith writes this newsletter. I was wondering what you thought about his idea that a sexual relationship with a source is sort of a tertiary concern as compared to the fealty as he says, that we as journalists feel to sources? And is it true that, like he says, American journalists haven't really reckoned with this?

FOLKENFLIK: Ben's a very smart guy, a serial news entrepreneur, and an interesting and fun thinker about journalism. And I've got a lot of regard for him. But this is pretty bananas as a claim. I think that if people are having an intimate relationship, whatever form that may take, with somebody who they're writing about or whose world they're writing about, but they fail to disclose—the supposed British sensibility of, “oh, well, we're all in bed with each other”—is bonkers and bullshit. And it's not how journalism should be conducted in the States, and it's not actually how journalism should be conducted in the UK either. And I've spent a fair amount of time in my career looking at that very question as well.

So I think that it's fun and clever to say that this isn't important, but of course it's important. It affects what you think, it affects what you're doing. My feeling is you can do almost anything as a journalist that you're willing to disclose to your editors, but also to your audiences. And if you're uncomfortable disclosing it to your audiences, maybe that's a sign that it's something you shouldn't be doing.

And the reason that that information was withheld was that Nuzzi knew it would be compromising, problematic and probably disqualifying. Ben writes at the end of his thing, “before I turn in my badge, I have to say you should tell your editors” about a personal relationship with a source. He’s right. Now what he doesn't say is, “and your editors will probably take that decision out of your hands and say you've gotta change beats, or you've gotta do something else."

The Shafer Algorithm is, of course, named for press apologist Jack Shafer. Here you can see how he dealt with the question "Is It OK to Sleep With Your Sources?" back in 2018.

(Disclosure: Watkins and I enjoyed a collegial rapport during her Politico tenure, but we never worked on any story or column together.)

...It’s never OK for reporters to sleep with their sources — or with elephants. Ali Watkins deserves a good scolding and professional reprimands if she crossed that line. But based on what we know about her case, she deserves a second chance. Given all the male reporters over the years who’ve escaped punishment for their sins of the flesh, it’s only fair.

And here you can see him addressing similar lapses with similar results again and again and again.

For those who haven't had enough of our original scandal:

Olivia Nuzzi accuses ex-fiance of orchestrating blackmail campaign amid RFK relationship

and

Three Women Say RFK Jr. Cheated on Cheryl Hines With Them

Based on this latter one, being a heroin addict who drives his ex-wife to suicide qualifies as "rambunctious." 

Michael C. Bender is basically a Theodore H. White A.I.

[I wrote this before the events in Springfield, but I think this piece has aged considerably better than Bender's so I'm running it as is.]

One of the signs of dysfunctional organization is that incompetent people thrive as long as they are adept at being wrong in the right way. Case in point, Michael C. Bender, perhaps the NYT's most spinnable journalist, who was last on our radar assuring us that DeSantis was dominating Trump in the early race for the nomination, and is now the paper's point man for J.D. Vance.

There is no temptation that Bender does not succumb to in these articles: the desire of an embedded journalist to depict their subject in the best possible light; the fear of deviating from what their bosses want to hear; the pull of lazy writing;  convenient credulity; narrative writing in the worst possible sense, hackneyed and distorted, complete with dusty cliches ("folksy tales about his hardscrabble upbringing," which not only is this painfully clichéd prose, it isn't even particularly accurate.)

Here's a taste.

 [Emphasis added... frequently.]

The in-flight candidate is, in many ways, a useful metaphor for the moment: a gifted yet fledgling political talent — whose calling card is his connection to the working class — adjusting to a new life with his own chartered Boeing 737 as the newly minted member of a Republican ticket headed by a three-time presidential contender.

Bit of context. The NYT was an early investor in the Vance narrative. He was the MAGA whisperer, the sensible conservative who could talk to Trump supporters because he was one of them. It was the Paul Ryan effect squared. The establishment press so wanted to believe in a sensible Republican to lead the party out of the craziness that they turned a blind eye to all the conflicting evidence. Not coincidentally, two years go Bender was writing articles arguing that Ron DeSantis was a remarkably gifted politician.

The talented Mr. Vance story is still a thing in the NYT despite having even less supporting evidence than the DeSantis narrative.

JD Vance is making history as the least liked VP nominee (non-incumbent) since 1980 following his/her party's convention. He's the first to have a net negative favorable rating.

Not surprising given how weak he ran in Ohio in 2022. Far worse than the average Ohio Republican. pic.twitter.com/hlZziePkKe

— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) July 24, 2024

A bit later, we get this gem reported without comment and, in the context of the rest of the article, apparently taken at face value.

“President Trump is thrilled with the choice he made with Senator Vance, and they are the perfect team to take back the White House,” said Steve Cheung, a Trump campaign spokesman.

Of course, Cheung is lying. The claim doesn't even pass the laugh test. No candidate since the introduction of approval polling has ever been happy with a running mate who got Vance-level numbers. You might expect to back off from the "this is fine" spin before they hit NYT Pitchbot territory ...

Instead they chose to double down.

JD Vance’s Combative Style Confounds Democrats but Pleases Trump

By Michael C. Bender

[And before you ask, no, this is not one of those good stories with bad headlines we've been talking about. If anything, the actual article is worse, starting with the first sentence.]

Donald J. Trump knew that JD Vance could take a punch. But during their first week together on the campaign trail, the former president wondered just how many hits his new running mate could absorb.

The volume and velocity of attacks from Democrats stunned even Mr. Trump. He was unaware of the most incendiary remarks that opponents were rapidly unearthing from Mr. Vance’s past, and the former president told allies that he was troubled by the idea that more comments would come to light as Democrats savaged his heir apparent as weird and anti-women.

A month later, polls show that the number of Americans who dislike Mr. Vance continues to grow — but Mr. Trump could not be happier.

The reason: Mr. Vance’s relentless pace of full-throttle performances as Mr. Trump’s well-trained attack dog has pleased the former president and instilled a sense of stability inside a campaign still shaken by President Biden’s sudden exit from the race.

Mr. Trump had instructed his young sidekick to fight forcefully through those initial attacks, and later said Mr. Vance’s execution exceeded his expectations, according to three allies who insisted on anonymity to discuss private conversations.

In a quintessentially Trumpian display of bravado, the former president has privately praised Mr. Vance by comparing himself to Vince Lombardi, telling people that his eye for political talent was now on par with the Hall of Fame football coach’s ability to find Super Bowl-caliber players.

And it just goes on like that, a bad pastiche of the Making of the President (a book that was never that good to begin with). Take a look at Nora Ephron's brilliant satiric essay on White's books.

And here's the opening paragraphs of Bender's earlier article:

Senator JD Vance was unsure where to stand or where to put his hands.

With a fresh haircut and a closely tailored blue suit on his first day of solo campaigning as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Mr. Vance walked to the back of his chartered airliner to chat with reporters on Monday. Briefly uncertain of how to start, he furrowed his brow and looked from side to side.

In addition to the banality, these details and the tone are often wildly at odds with the impressions of most observers.

Mr. Vance’s excitement at joining the fray was immediately visible. He arrived with a fresh haircut and neatly trimmed beard for his first solo rally, a hometown event in Middletown, Ohio. In a sign of his astonishment at every warm welcome from his pro-Trump crowds, Mr. Vance opened each event for the first several weeks with the same single exclamation: “Wow!"

Nothing in this paragraph lines up with the clips we've seen from the campaign trail featuring a stiff candidate speaking to often tiny crowds and trying to come off as normal while putting on a brave face.

I mean this is a full pan of JD’s Kenosha event. Seriously, 60 people? It like a speech to the county chess club. pic.twitter.com/MRsEwJ8TjX

— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) August 21, 2024

OMG, I'm dying - this is the crowd this morning for JD Vance in New Kensington, PA - and he has his wife and 3 GOP members of Congress along with him. There's like 20 people again....look at all the empty seats in the tiny room 🤣😅😂 pic.twitter.com/wlBCNYpafI

— Amy Siskind 🏳️‍🌈 (@Amy_Siskind) August 15, 2024

J.D. Vance Blames Staff for Disastrous Doughnut-Shop Visit is not a headline a campaign likes to see.

JD Vance had a very awkward visit to a donut shop in Georgia earlier. Trust us, it’s worse than you even think. pic.twitter.com/Fnohh0bKUf

— MeidasTouch (@MeidasTouch) August 22, 2024

Vance even managed to screw up perhaps the softest of all softball questions in all politics.

JD Vance is asked by reporter, “What makes you smile? What makes you happy?”. He responds with a fake, weird laugh. (Video: C-SPAN) pic.twitter.com/lr8woQbEkw

— Mike Sington (@MikeSington) August 7, 2024

As one tweet put it: "If this guy were a country his top domestic export would be steppable rakes."

It's possible that these moments are unrepresentative and if so, it would be perfectly appropriate for Bender to address that in the article, but this is just a campaign trying to wish away bad news and a New York Times reporter going along. 

That sense of reading a story about an entirely different race is sharpest when it gets to the reaction of the other side.

Democrats, however, have been outraged and confounded by Mr. Vance’s vice-presidential bid. This year, Mr. Trump had spoken at length about finding a running mate who was uniquely qualified to take over as president — and then picked Mr. Vance, who assumed his first elected office just last year and turned 40 less than a month ago.

While it's true, Democrats are outraged by many of Vance's positions, the general reaction from a strategic point of view has been celebratory -- they generally view Trump's choice as disastrous -- and while those celebrations may prove premature, the polling so far seems to support their assessment.

Honestly, I have not noticed any confounding among the Democrats pic.twitter.com/2qTqmKPxRm

— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) September 2, 2024

The word "confounded" is an even more curious choice. No one at the Harris campaign seems confused by how to deal with him. Her digital team has produced a steady stream of spots that consist of nothing more than a choice quote and an accompanying video clip.

 Of course, Vance could yet surprise his critics -- it's always a bad idea to predict a career based on a debut -- but if you're going to make a counterintuitive argument you have to actually argue your points, not simply pretend that they are true. The data, overwhelming anecdotal evidence, and common sense  suggest that he is not a gifted politician, that he is not generating significant support even within the MAGA base, and that many in the Trump organization (quite possibly most) regret their impulsive choice. 

I don't know these things are true but if you're going to push a narrative about a remarkable young talent who's charming the masses and impressing everyone around him, you need to at least acknowledge the obvious.

10 years ago at the blog – – this one's gotten more relevant along at least a couple of dimensions

Obviously, anything having to do with the Ebola outbreak will take on an added significance given what happened a few years later, but the part that jumps out to me is that this wasn't early example of the Straussian breakdown and other trends in the GOP that would become the dominant features of the party and would go on to have a disastrous impact on the country.

Tuesday, October 28, 2014

Yes, a Surgeon General would come in handy right about now

For me, one of the most interesting stories in politics these days is the way that information has come to flow in the the conservative movement. And sometimes the most interesting part of that story is the way information fails to flow.

Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) says Ron Klain is "off to a bad start" in his new role as the president's Ebola response coordinator, and that the U.S. Surgeon General should be the one leading the effort. But what Chaffetz doesn't seem to realize is that there hasn't been a surgeon general for more than a year.

“Why not have the surgeon general head this up?" Chaffetz asked in a Wednesday appearance on Fox News. "I think that’s a very legitimate question. At least you have somebody who has a medical background whose been confirmed by the United States Senate.”

“It begs the question, what does the surgeon general do?" he added. "Why aren’t we empowering that person?”

After this broke, Chaffetz tried to moonwalk his way back from the statement but there is simply no way to frame this so that the man comes off as both well-informed and honest. His problem is that he is trying to follow an official party line that makes consistency almost impossible (you can't block relevant nominations and gut relevant funding while plausibly complaining about the government doing too little to address an epidemic).

I suspect the root of the problem is that the leadership of the conservative movement fell in love with the appealing but doubly flawed idea that you can create optimal messaging by controlling the process. Fox News has always been a hothouse for ideas and arguments crafted to appeal to the base. Conflicting data and effective counter-arguments were largely kept out of the environment.

This approach can work for a while but at some point you lose control. The system is too complex to fine-tune. Eventually you find yourself saddled with a bunch of ideas that the base is committed to even though they can't hope to survive in the outside world.

 

More Mort

Mort Sahl Mocks The Presidential Candidates in The Upcoming 1968 Election

A traditional Republican's case against Dobbs

Highly recommended video from Tim Miller of the Bulwark. There are at least a couple of reasons you should watch this. First, the ads shown and discussed from the Harris campaign are among the most disturbing and provocative you've ever seen, and I mean that in the right way. They provoke entirely appropriate discomfort and anger.

Second, Miller's comments are worth listening to both for their content, and also for who Miller is, someone who, despite having gone all in on opposing Trump and the current state of the party, still views the world as a moderate Republican.

A Littleton, Colorado native, Miller started out in Republican politics as an intern working on the 1998 Colorado gubernatorial election.^[3][4] He later earned a bachelor's degree from the George Washington University School of Media and Public Affairs.^[5]

Miller was an Iowa staffer for John McCain in the 2008 Republican Party presidential primaries, and later served as national press secretary for the Jon Huntsman 2012 presidential campaign.^[5] In his role with the Huntsman campaign, Miller was credited by Esquire for making its daily email to reporters "surprisingly hip".^[6] After the primary, Miller joined the Republican National Committee as its liaison to Mitt Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.^[7]

In 2015, Miller was hired by former Florida governor Jeb Bush to be a senior adviser to his presidential exploratory committee, Right to Rise political action committee (PAC), and went on to serve as the communications director for Bush's presidential campaign.^[5][8][9] During the campaign, Miller drew notice as a "vocal critic" of Donald Trump.^[10] Following a 2016 South Carolina Republican primary debate, Miller followed Trump around the spin room heckling him until Miller was "hip-checked" by Trump campaign strategist Corey Lewandowski.^[11]

 Apologies for the formatting, but here are some of the comments that I found worth repeating. 

The essential take away here is that the anti-reproductive rights movement (calling it anti-abortion no longer provides an accurate picture) has gone to a place so dark and misogynistic that many people who consider themselves at least moderately pro-life are appalled by what they're seeing. The Harris campaign has made the smart (and I would say moral) decision to focus on the most indefensible consequences of Dobbs: victims of rape; girls so young we would consider them children; women bleeding out in emergency room parking lots.

The press has been pushing for Harris to take more positions on divisive issues. Personally I think it is both savvy and right to prioritize urgent points of agreement, and I can't think of many issues more urgent than this.

Abortion -- Secondary and Tertiary Effects

One of the points we have been hammering for a long time now is that much, possibly even most of the impact of the Dobbs ruling will come from its secondary and tertiary effects. For the moment, we are keeping the discussion very narrow and leaving out issues like rape and incest or the larger impact on reproductive rights, not because they are unimportant (very much the opposite), but because they are too big to work in here.

Some of this is arbitrary, but this is how we are defining our terms.

The primary effect is that women lose the right to terminate a pregnancy.

Secondary effects include treatments for pregnant women, particularly with respect to miscarriages and other complications. They generally involve healthcare providers refusing to perform necessary procedures out of the fear that these will be incorrectly classified as abortions.

Tertiary effects include the direct and indirect impact on the healthcare and rights of all women including those who are not and in some cases may not be capable of becoming pregnant. If a woman loses access to a drug because that drug can also be used as an abortifacient, that is a tertiary effect. If a woman's Dr. moves out of a state or if new doctors choose not to locate in a state due to antiabortion laws, that is a tertiary effect. If women lose their right to privacy due to things like menstrual tracking, that is a tertiary effect.

The negative impact on postnatal treatment is a tertiary effect, which brings us to Louisiana, which even more than Texas has become Ground Zero for this story.

From NPR's All Things Considered:

A new Louisiana law will re-classify misoprostol as a dangerous controlled substance

Rosemary Westwood | September 27, 2024

 Louisiana already bans nearly all abortions. But starting in October, there will be additional restrictions on mifepristone and misoprostol. These drugs are used in medication abortions but also have other uses in pregnancy care. Under a new law in Louisiana, they will be reclassified as controlled, dangerous substances. WWNO’s Rosemary Westwood in New Orleans explains why doctors there are worried.

If women start bleeding out after giving birth, one of the key drugs doctors can reach for is misoprostol. It’s effective, safe and cheap. And hospitals often keep it immediately available on special hemorrhage carts in labor and delivery rooms.

JENNIFER AVEGNO: You have it either right there in the room, in an easy-to-access cart, or you’ve got nurses who walk around with it in their pocket, going from room to room.

WESTWOOD: That’s Dr. Jennifer Avegno, the director of the New Orleans Health Department. Over the summer, she started hearing that hospitals were pulling misoprostol off the carts and out of the rooms. They’re moving the drug to locked cabinets because that’s what’s required for controlled, dangerous substances.

Most controlled drugs have the potential of being abused, like Ambien and Xanax. Misoprostol doesn’t. But in some hospitals, doctors or nurses will have to go farther to reach it and unlock the cabinet. Avegno says some are even running drills to see how much longer it will take. New Orleans OB-GYN Nicole Freehill says any delay is dangerous.

NICOLE FREEHILL: Somebody’s just bleeding profusely. And at that point, if it takes even two minutes to access that medicine versus 20 seconds that it used to take when it was on the hemorrhage cart in the room, those seconds matter.

Under the category of secondary effects, which have produced dozens of horrifying and heartbreaking stories, Louisiana was also the state where Kaitlyn Joshua suffered her traumatic experience.

WATCH: “This experience helped me see how Black women like me die needlessly… This is government and political interference in private health care decisions…”

Kaitlyn Joshua testified powerfully about how Republican abortion bans almost killed her. #ForcedBirthNation pic.twitter.com/bbD8XL8rTo

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) September 24, 2024

Ten years ago at the blog -- turns out this wasn't nearly the stupidest thing Marc Andreessen was saying.

 A quick google search shows that 2014 was the year that Andreessen went big on Bitcoin. Crypto wasn't on our radar at the time, but had we been paying attention, we wouldn't have been all that surprised that this guy was involved.  

Wednesday, October 22, 2014

"The skeptics are wrong all the time"

Marc Andreessen has a new interview up and it is characteristically packed with silliness. If things had gone better for ViolaWWW, do you think Pei-Yuan Wei would have gotten this annoying?

What did you do?

I just went to college. I did my thing. I came out here in ’94, and Silicon Valley was in hibernation. In high school, I actually thought I was going to have to learn Japanese to work in technology. My big feeling was I just missed it, I missed the whole thing. It had happened in the ’80s, and I got here too late. But then, I’m maybe the most optimistic person I know. I mean, I’m incredibly optimistic. I’m optimistic arguably to a fault, especially in terms of new ideas. My presumptive tendency, when I’m presented with a new idea, is not to ask, “Is it going to work?” It’s, “Well, what if it does work?”
...

But clearly you don’t think everything’s going to work.

No. But there are people who are wired to be skeptics and there are people who are wired to be optimists. And I can tell you, at least from the last 20 years, if you bet on the side of the optimists, generally you’re right.

On the other hand, if there’d been a few more skeptics in 1999, people might have kept their retirement money. Isn’t there a role for skepticism in the tech industry?

I don’t know what it buys you. Let me put it this way. If you could point to periods of time in the last hundred years when everything just stabilized and didn’t change, then maybe yes. But that never seems to actually happen. The skeptics are wrong all the time.

There is a huge survivor bias in the way Andreessen and other creative disruptors compile their case studies. They only remember the lottery tickets that paid off and this leads them to dispense some very bad advice.

When it comes to investing in innovation, skeptics are right a lot -- quite possibly most -- of the time. We've been at this for well over a century, at least since Edisonades started showing up next to the dime Westerns. If you couldn't be a Bell or a Wright, you could at least be the investor who got in on the ground floor.

The trouble was, then and now, that there tend to be more Paige Compositors than light bulbs. Uncritical blanket optimism is a bad way to approach investments. I'd also argue that, if you're setting your sights higher than Snapchat, it's also a bad way to promote innovation but that's a topic for another post.